


hello, here we go

by jontinf



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alternate Canon, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Budding Love, Domesticity, F/M, Fluff and Crack, Humor, Male-Female Friendship, Missing Scene, Roommates, Season/Series 08, Slice of Life, Whouffaldi Secret Santa 2017
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-25
Updated: 2018-01-11
Packaged: 2019-02-20 15:37:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,284
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13149684
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jontinf/pseuds/jontinf
Summary: The Doctor moves in with Clara. It’s an adjustment.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [JediJanine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/JediJanine/gifts).



**Wednesday January 1, 2014**

Ten hours into New Year’s Day, she stumbles upon him in a launderette in Shoreditch reading the paper in his pants.

At least she thinks that’s him.

Clara does a double take outside the window, studying the white-haired man, who is either a pervert, very disoriented, or takes mid-morning laundry with an enormous amount of seriousness.

No, it’s him.

(So, all of the above, probably.) 

The Doctor sits straight against the ancient tapioca hued machines. No coat, or waistcoat, or trousers, or shirt, and shelling a bewildered frown at the lifestyle section from the previous year’s Evening Standard.

The socks and shoes have remained, however, and a vest. He’s skinnier than she’d thought under all those layers.

The unseen pièce de résistance of this face’s new look, she discovers, have been the boxers, which boast mathematical notations printed on bright red fabric.

At his side is a half-eaten kebab, along with what looks like a phone number scribbled on the wrapper from someone named Fifi.

_Fifi._

Was he wearing trousers when he got lunch? Doesn’t matter. Hell is empty.

She enters the launderette. “Doctor?”

The other patrons look on in judgement. She wears dark glasses and lets her hangover groceries fall onto the linoleum. She realises she might still be a little drunk.

His eyes flick upward from his paper. There is nothing unusual about any of this, apparently.

“Can I help you?” he says. The last time she’d seen him was coffee and chips in Glasgow.

He is happy to see her. She can hear it in his voice, but he also peeks around as though she might be embarrassing him.

 _She_ embarrassing _him:_ Mr. Calvin Klein and Kebab 2014. 

“Can I help _you?_ ” she retorts.

“Just doing my laundry. You know how it is.” He folds the paper, places it on his lap, and offers her the most unsettling fake grin of his life. “Have you always had bangs?” 

“You’re doing small talk.”

“No, I’m not.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing.”

“Where’s the…” she leans close and whispers. _“…TARDIS?”_

The Doctor doesn’t meet her eye. “That’s, well, that’s complicated. It’s, uh—the thing is—when two people have been together for a long time, and one of them is a space-time machine…”

She threatens to cold wash the rest of the kebab. He gets to the point.

There was an argument. The TARDIS needs her space. Pun not intended. He doesn’t really want to talk about it—not that it stops him from talking about it.

The Doctor doesn’t explicitly say it, but Clara can tell that he suspects this has something to do with the new face, a body rejecting its new organ.

But the thing is that the TARDIS has never been spooked by the other ones.

Jesus. 

That still didn’t quite explain the pants and the launderette. Did he fall in a puddle? Had he been wandering the wintry streets of London for days in the same clothes? How did he pay for the kebab?

He is not in the mood to help her get to the bottom of any of these concerns.

“This is a _calamity,_ Clara,” the Doctor says, biting miserably into what is left of his kebab. 

*

“Is this were you live?” 

“Yes.”

Clara’s flat is enveloped in darkness and stinks like lager. She’s in the kitchen concocting a hair-of-the-dog cocktail. She winces while fishing out of her coat pocket a pair of cheap knickers that do not belong to her and subsequently binning them. She can still smell the perfume of their wearer on her skin.

The Doctor takes a photograph from her mantle and knits his brow. He’s in this one—well, the other him. His arm is swung around her neck. She’s wearing a silver dress. Space Vegas. 

He sets the photo back on the mantle, an irritating pang of jealousy hitting him behind his ribs, and assesses his surroundings.

“What about the other place you were in last week?”

Clara answers from the kitchen. “This is that place.”

She hasn’t bothered to take down the tree or move her table back into the kitchen. His finger presses against the spines of each book on the shelf. “Are you sure?”

She finally emerges, grasping at a tin cup. He looks utterly lost. Something about him reminds her of _Alice in Wonderland_ , as if he were poised to grow enormous after eating magical cake, limbs bursting out of windows and doors.

“You were here during Christmas, Doctor. With my dad and gran and you were nake—” She stops herself. Her plaid skirt still sits in the washer under the kitchen counter. The one he’d slapped while her bum was in it. God, she hopes he’s forgotten that. “You were dressed for church.”

“Tosh. Nobody dresses for church.” The Doctor pulls open the blinds, then lets them drop immediately when he glimpses her nudist neighbour. “ _Oh._ ”

He turns to face her with a newfound self-awareness. “Your dad?”

“Yes.”

“And your gran?”

Clara smiles. “She liked you.”

“I bet she did.”

With that, she pinches her nose and downs the cocktail. “Gross.”

*

“Sorry. That’s not possible.” Kate Stewart sits across from them in her UNIT office wearing sunglasses, an Aloha shirt, and a lei.

They obviously caught her at an awkward time. Surprisingly, she doesn’t seem at all fazed by the new face or his magician exterior.

The Doctor is aghast. “Why not?”

“I was directed not to help you.”

“Katherine Lethbridge-Stewart, how many times have I told you not to take direction from idiots?”

“Well, you _were_ the one who gave me that direction, Doctor.”

The plot thickens. Clara smirks, and her shoulder bumps his. “It appears, in this case, _you’re_ the idiot.”

“You were very adamant,” Kate explains. “Under no circumstances am I to help you locate the TARDIS. And she will return in her own time as promised.”

“No, that doesn’t sound right. Are you sure it was me? It might not have been me.” He stands up, ruffling his hair absent-mindedly.

“ZYGONS!” He points with temerity at Kate. “It might have been a zygon.”

“It wasn’t a zygon.” Osgood rolls out on a chair from behind a filing cabinet, also not fazed by the new face. Clara frowns. Did they all just have a secret meeting? Osgood grins. “I would know.”

*

The doors of the Tower of London slam shut behind them after they’re escorted out by security. Their UNIT compatriots found the whole situation more amusing than either of them felt warranted.

“This is horrifying,” the Doctor declares. “My box is missing, and there’s a zygon out there impersonating me.” He stops in the middle of the pavement. “Maybe the zygons have my TARDIS. _Clara._ ”

If only it were that simple.

“No, that was you. Kate had that letter with the genetically authenticated affidavit and everything.”

“Crikey, what a drama queen.”

“Kate?”

“No, me.”

“What are you going to do?” she asks.

“Dunno. How do your lot occupy themselves?” He actually doesn’t want to know. Humans, as a rule, loved tedium. And mortgages. And floss. And checking accounts. Mixed in with procreation, which could be tedious. Then even more tedium. On repeat.

He’s finally paying for his sins.

At the very least, this completely threw off all of his post-regeneration plans. Really important things. He was due to play canasta with Venus’s answer to Zelda Fitzgerald. Not that Venus Zelda was aware of it.

Clara’s eyes widen. The gravity of the situation finally dawns on her. “Crap, we’re really grounded, aren’t we?”

“It’s not so funny now, is it?”

“Well, okay. Fine.” A contingency plan takes form in what little brain cells are left after last night. “We’ll just have to make the best of it, yeah? Take control. We’ll get through it.”

He blinks. “Why are you talking like one of us has typhoid?”

The last time he was stranded on Earth he at least got to watch a live moon landing. What happens this year? Ebola? Scotland has second thoughts?

He flinches when she wraps her arm around his. “Brave heart, Doctor.”

 

**Thursday January 2**

“I don’t know how much longer I can live like this. She should have been back by now.” He’s sprawled on her sofa, long legs hanging off the arm with all the pitifulness of an upturned ladybug. “The TARDIS is a time machine.”

“ _She is?_ ” she teases. He rolls his eyes.

It’s only been a day, by the way. Clara sits in another chair, clutching a hot water bottle to her chest, wrapped in a blanket. The heater has broken. How did she ever manage without Gallifreyan technology? Drat, she’s going to have to learn iPlayer now.

On the bright side, in the time that he’s been here, he got her flat back to its pre-Christmas state, reorganized her entire book collection, composed three volumes of literary criticism on said book collection, reconfigured her table lamp into a coffeemaker and her coffeemaker into a radio and her toaster into a modem, made the first of several last-ditch efforts to convince Donald Trump not to run for president (and only made it worse), called into BBC Radio 4 to chastise the hosts for getting on his nerves, and won tickets to an Electric Light Orchestra concert. They were going in March.

He also broke the heater.

“My point is that she could have just gone back right after she left. It’s not like time has to actually pass _for_ _me_.”

He did have a point there. Nothing made sense. Maybe the zygons _were_ involved. Or one of the other eleven thousand enemies he had. And what exactly was a future Doctor trying to do by separating him from their TARDIS?

“She must be punishing me.”

Or that. But for what? Clara knows now that this face may be more the Doctor than he’s been in a long while. The TARDIS would know this. She knew him better than anyone. This had to be about something else.

“She did leave you with me. Maybe she’s punishing _me_.” She scoops a handful of dry Cheerio’s from a bowl and throws them at his head.

He cracks a smile at the whole cereal onslaught to his face. She secretly admits there’s a loveliness to it, an innocence unexpected of a man like him. It reminds her of—well, that doesn’t matter now.

Clara rises to clean up the mess, and the Doctor returns to pensiveness, his eyes fixating on the plaster of her ceiling.

“Clara,” he starts slowly, “am I a good—”

“Did you sonic _my vibrator?!”_

She’d found it on the floor and now holds it with a violent stupefaction. The jet black wand jovially lights up like a multifunctional Christmas tree.

“I made it better. What did you even do with that before? Was that supposed to be a musical instrument in its former life? Well, now, it’s a tactical advantage.”

_“You sonic-ed. a. sex. toy.”_

An awkward silence.

Her main aim is to stay angry because he needs to learn boundaries and all, but it’s also very hard—difficult, _difficult_ —not to inquire if it works on wood.

He, on the other hand, has gone totally white. “A sex what?”

“We need to have a talk.” 

 

**47 Seconds Later**

“You’ve done _what_ with my tactical advantage?!”

 

**Friday January 3**

She takes her new ward shopping for clothes. He’s not a cartoon, after all, and might need more than one outfit. The Doctor interprets it as her way of saying she doesn’t like his new clothes.

When taking the Doctor shopping, Clara can expect the following to happen:

  1. He will read the ingredients for everything he sees in the shop. (It’s Christmas all over again for him.)
  2. He will observe everyone warily, including children—especially children.
  3. He will judge an establishment based on the variety of prawn crackers they offer.
  4. He will wander.
  5. All the cakes will unexpectedly go missing.



“I suppose we should get you razors,” she says.

“Why?”

“Unless you want to use the ones I use.”

The Doctor’s gaze falls on her upper lip. Rude.

“For my legs,” she affirms. “Um, generally.”

“You shave your legs?” He practically exclaims this. A nearby nervous woman moves away. “Sometimes I forget this point in human history was all about hair removal. In a few decades, leg hair will be rampant.”

“I suppose humans finally achieve a certain level of enlightenment.”

“No, there’s an ice age.”

“Oh.”

He takes the cart now filled with a plethora of “Doctor stuff” as Clara terms them and nonchalantly moves onto the next aisle.

“Hang on,” she calls after him. “And you just _let_ that happen?”

They’re ubered home with their shopping, which include ten packets of jelly babies, twenty packets of prawn crackers, the entire ALF boxset, and yet another phone number for the Doctor, this time belonging to a man named Tim.

 

**Monday January 7**

The Doctor assumes that Clara will forgive him.

The ends justify the means, which, in this case, is her laptop possibly spontaneously combusting for the purpose of getting them back where they belong. Who needs HBO GO when you have all of time and space?

While she’s at work, he managed to route a makeshift VPN to call the Paternoster Gang in the 19th century. He was successful on the second try—the first being misdirected to a municipal underground toilet.

“Vastra, Jenny, you’re a sight for earth-bound eyes. I need to ask you a favour.”

In their parlour, Vastra artfully holds a grenade, and Jenny wears her assassin get up. Must be date night.

“Sorry, Doctor,” Vastra replies.

Oh no.

“If it’s about the TARDIS,” she continues, “we’re under strict orders.”

“From…”

“You.”

“Right,” the Doctor says. “Of course.”

(He could be such a bastard sometimes.)

“How’re you doing otherwise?” Jenny asks.

“I’m living with Clara.”

“Felicitations on your cohabitation!” Strax has apparently sprouted out of the ground, shirt flung open like a Harlequin novel, and a goat attached to his teat. “Have you received all the necessary immunizations for carnal contact? And, remind me, Doctor, are you the man one?”

The connection begins to falter. The Doctor wants to die. “What? No. I mean yes. I mean no. No. Not like that. I mean. I’m not—are you nursing a goat?”

“Irrelevant,” Strax replies. “It appears that you are malfunctioning. A good wallop to the head should fix it.”

Strax reaches for the screen with a fisted hand, and Jenny slaps it away. “We’ve been working on his social skills. We’ve _also_ been explaining to him that ‘man ones’ aren’t essential to certain relationships, but he gets easily distracted.”

The Doctor feels uneasy. Strax is probably going to eat that goat.

“Er, good night, Doctor,” Vastra says, now trying to detach the animal from its wet nurse. “And good luck.”

The screen goes blank.

“Et tu, Brute?” He buries his face in his hands. “All the TARDISes in the entire cosmos, and I pick the maddest, most diabolical bird in the line-up.”

Unbeknownst to the Doctor, that one call quadruples Clara’s utility bill. Somehow this distresses her only slightly less than the sonic vibrator.

 

**Sunday January 13**

His Scottish accent seems to get stronger by the day without the TARDIS translation circuit around. It makes Clara wonder if all Gallifreyans actually sounded Scottish.

Additional development: Clara’s Sky Plus now transcends time and space. They binge space soaps all weekend, and the Doctor translates.

The one they’re watching by Sunday has two star-crossed war medics caught in the Time War, Drav, a nurse, and Soaph, a surgeon. Since there were no Gallifreyans available, the roles were played by blue-skinned actors with a species name only pronounceable by three-tongued mouths.

In the soap, the lovers decide to run off together at the war’s end, but Soaph is mortally wounded. Something goes wrong in her regeneration, and she’s reborn no longer remembering Drav.

“And Drrrrrav resolves tae bide his days as a recluse, destined tae be haunted by a deep, irrevocable, ‘n ultimately, unrequited love fur eternity.”

They both stare dumbfounded at the telly. Time Lords are so ride or die. Granted, he might have been projecting. She might have been too. Everything they both lost since last Christmas.

Then again, he's the one who just spent a thousand years fending for himself, trapped in another endless war, forced to watch generations of his friends die for centuries.

The Doctor hits pause and aims his sonic between his eyes. Electricity shoots into his forehead. She gapes.

“Ow,” he calmly says.

What the fuck?

The question is mostly directed at herself when she realises she’s more interested in why he still has his old screwdriver than the fact that he just casually electrocuted himself. She supposes it’s the TARDIS who could give him a new one.

“End of Act Three.” He sounds less Scottish now, much to her regret. “What? Do you want me to start speaking to you in Gaelic?”

“Maybe.”

His ears go a little pink; a half-hearted, shy smile blooms. The Doctor’s also been growing out his hair, tufts of curls framing his face, each a different shade of grey—another development she privately appreciates. It’s also an observation she plans to take to the grave.

“Blimey.” Clara tries to change the subject. She silently offers him a packet of prawn crackers. There’s Chinese takeaway scattered all over the floor. “Soaph did him dirty. Even if unintentional.”

He delicately takes a bite. _Craaackk!!_ “It’s pronounced _Soaph_.”

“That’s what I said.” She rolls her eyes and then presses her head onto his shoulder. He eyes the top of her head hesitantly.

She looks up at him with relish. “You’re a romantic.”

“I am not.” His mouth is full of prawn cracker. It betrays the masculine assertiveness he wants to project.

“‘Deep, irrevocable.’”

“Stop that.”

“Oh, Doctor, under that grouchy exterior beat the hearts of a complete sentimental idiot.”

“Right,” he says. “That’s the last time I ever spend any quality time with you.” He stands and unravels himself out of her plush peach dressing gown. “I may speak to you again if I ever find it within me to forgive you.”

He stomps into the bedroom and shuts the door.

Clara shrugs, starts Act Four, and the opening titles begin to play.

The bedroom door creaks open, and she grins. For one thing, bedrooms terrify and confuse him.

The Doctor sits back down and retrieves the dressing gown.

“Shut up,” he says.

* 

He notices half way through Act 53 that she’s fallen asleep. There was a suspicious lack of piss-taking from his left side. Also the snoring.

The Doctor observes the sleeping Clara a mite longer than he should allow himself.

He gently chides. “Would it kill you to stay awake for a standard minimum of 74 hours?” He sighs. The narcolepsy _is_ getting very irritating.

He cradles her into his arms, careful to lift her in such a way that the blanket still covers her body. He’d forgotten that she’s a deep sleeper. A helpful quality.

He’s forgotten a lot of things.

The Doctor overcomes, for a moment, his distaste of bedrooms in order to set her on her bed and brushes her hair out of her face.

He confides, “Not that you should go about changing.”

 

**Wednesday January 16**

“Why couldn’t you get a bigger flat?”

“London, that’s why. Everything is smaller on the inside.” She chuckles at her own joke and then switches on her lamp, which begins to brew the morning coffee.

The answer doesn’t appease him. He paces back and forth in her hallway in the pyjamas she purchased. He’s gotten so accustomed to wearing them that sometimes that’s how he leaves the house. It’s flattering, but she fears that people might mistake him for being in some kind of fugue state, sentient anachronism that he is.

He continues strolling about her flat like some 19th century Earl paying an edifying visit to the slums of East London, occasionally stopping to feed the Edwardian mice that he’s been keeping in her hearth. (It’s a long story.) Sometimes the mice wear tiny monocles to proofread the Doctor’s correspondence, some of which include his request to become the head of the official Shirley Bassey fan club. No reply so far.

He’s restless. He’s always been but now enough to get desperate.

Clara can’t blame him. She misses it too. The whole 9-5 grind with no escape into the stars is a hard pill to swallow. They were due a lucky break. Soon.

*

She returns home during her lunch hour to check on him only to find a hole the size of the Gulf of Mexico in her wall. She can see clear into the neighbour’s loo.

The Doctor’s never witnessed anyone seethe with such ferocious purpose. He momentarily sees all thirteen regenerations flash before his eyes. 

“You should say something,” the Doctor says. He’s wearing a feather capitano hat, as are the mice. It was part of a thing they were doing—unrelated to the hole. Okay, indirectly related. If one quibbles over semantics. “‘Go away?’ or ‘Don’t ever speak to me again?’ How about ‘that colour suits your chin’?”

“When I’m done with you, you won’t have a chin.”

“I can fix this.”

“I’m going to be evicted. I might even be arrested. Was there anyone hurt?”

“No. Nobody’s home. And, you can stay with me.”

“Your house left you.”

“Listen, I made lunch.”

In truth, he’s taken over any cooking responsibilities in the Oswald household. Clara can’t cook to save her life. Literally. They once found themselves on a cooking competition to the death. Losers got eaten. He can’t cook much better either, but she sets things on fire—which incidentally saved them from getting eaten.

“Fix this,” she demands.

“Sure, okay, when I get my TARDIS back. Although, this may be a fixed point.”

“It is not a fixed point.”

He considers the hole. “It looks pretty fixed to me.” 

“You don’t need time travel to fix the hole in this wall!”

“Work smarter, not harder, Clara.”

“Ugh!!”

“Where are you going?” he asks as she storms out the door.

The Doctor makes a point to write down the sound she just made for further scrutiny. She later explains that it is human for, “Fuckssake, you extra-terrestrial dickhead.” A likely story.

*

She returns home close to midnight, a slew of missed calls on her phone, and sort of ready to apologise. Presumably, he did not bludgeon a hole in her flat on purpose. 

Then she turns on the light, finds that the damage has disappeared, and her flat now encompasses two additional floors, a massive Baroque library, a topiary, a movie theatre, a study (his new place to sleep or whatever he does at night), and a silver mustard pot with a tiny spoon.

Clara steps out of her flat, looks around, and then enters again. She might pass out.

He leans against a wall, smug and still wearing that ridiculous hat.

“It’s—” she says.

“I know.”

He notices that she’s not smiling. Maybe he overdid it. Crap, he over did it. At least she doesn’t know about the aviary yet. “Do you hate it?”

She laughs, a tad psychotic, but who’s to judge? “Are you kidding?”

They put off the conversation on how to explain this to guests.

 

**Wednesday January 29**

When living with Clara Oswald, the Doctor can expect the following to happen:

  1. He will walk in on her cutting split ends over the bathroom sink. She will glance at him offhandedly and explain, “I’m a schoolteacher” to his look of confusion and faint awe. Whatever that means. He knows what that means—he’s just not familiar with living on a budget. After all, he couldn’t go a month without turning her 677 sq. ft. flat into a mansion. (She also tells him that the's eating her out of house and home, but he doesn’t hear.)
  2. Clara speaks fast on the phone, and in life, but on the phone, she often has to slow down and repeat herself. “O-s-w-a-l-d,” she spells for the seventh time. “’S’ as in Sam. Yes. ‘S.’ Yes.” Sometimes it feels like purgatory. Sometimes he can feel his hearts race, as if the whole conversation could rip a tear in the space time continuum.
  3. She will try to cook a soufflé once a month. It will go poorly.
  4. He makes her laugh. Usually, not on purpose. One time he deduced that menstruation was contagious. That was _hilarious_ to her. There were tears. Clearly, someone needs to step out of her earth-normative mindset.
  5. She hates it when he wanders off but never fails to let him get away with it. That’s something he’s always known.



**Friday January 31**

Payday, at last. How to celebrate? How about stumbling upon your prodigal flatmate sitting in a holding cell near Tower Hill for drunkenness?

“Stumble” may be a generous term. More like she receives a phone call requesting that she retrieve him without any further delay.

This time, he’s wearing all of his clothing, but he’s also unshaven and surrounded by a flock of very inebriated men. The police thought he was one of them.

“You’re a bloody menace,” she jokes when she finds him.

He tips his head. “Thank you, thank you.”

“Your father, Ms. Oswald?” the officer asks.

“Excuse you,” the Doctor protests. “Are you blind?”

She shakes her head. It’s the Doctor who’s fairly face blind. (She hopes.) He forgets that time did not pass for her while he was on Trenzalore. They’ve had a lot of conversations on why senior discounts do not apply just yet.

“Not hard to see how someone would think you’re a drunk,” she says.

He later explains himself as they sit on a bench alongside the Thames, the city’s skyline shimmering ahead of them.

“I tried to break into UNIT. For the teleporters.”

“You were going to steal a teleporter?”

“Borrow.”

This isn’t even his first attempt—each time he’d been thwarted. UNIT had received a recent security upgrade, and he is fairly certain it was by a future version of himself. What an arse he was. Brilliant but an arse all the same.

Clara smiles at her shoes. He couldn’t see the humour in the predicament, naturally. “Have you ever wondered about how nobody’s ever willingly given you a time machine?”

“Your point?”

She takes out two pieces of mail out of her purse. “For you.”

He reads the postcard first. The photo on the front has a picture of a gibbon playing the ukulele.

“It’s the TARDIS,” he says. “She wants to let me know that she hasn’t been kidnapped, and there are no hard feelings. It’s for my own good.”

“That’s it?”

“Yeah.”

What a cow. Or, wait. “Are you sure that’s her?”

“The ukulele gibbon is a private joke.”

Those two nutters were made for each other.

“You know what this means?” he asks.

“What?”

“I think a future version of myself and the TARDIS have been in cahoots the whole time.”

Bloomin' hell. “When it comes to self-sabotage, you certainly like to play the long game, don’t you?”

The Doctor laughs.

“What about the other one?” she asks.

He tears open the envelope, scans the letter, and smiles. “I’m on a probationary period to run the Shirley Bassey Fan Club.”

They both share a delirious cackle. The thrill of human existence.

“Are you hungry?” Clara asks. “I got paid, and I know this excellent fruit stand. Only sells pears.”

The trauma is palpable in his eyes. “Very funny.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Wednesday February 5**

“Clara!”

The Doctor likes saying her name. It’s something he’s in denial of, this habit, an itch to divert her attention back to him, as if jealous of shoelaces or detergent or road signs. It’s needy and embarrassing, he knows this in the back of his mind, where he keeps the other information he usually ignores.

She sits crossed-legged on her living room floor, surrounded by a deluge of marking, Dickens or whatever.

He stands on her balcony, screwdriver in one hand and a pineapple in the other. He initially refused to elaborate on this project, except that it has to do with alternating currents, tropical fruit, and the fate of evolution as they know it. They went to five different supermarkets to find the exactly right pineapple at the risk of the whole of Britain being swallowed into a black hole and there being be no more Thursdays. 

“Quantum mechanics will one day reveal that Thursdays, Britain, and pineapples are intrinsically related,” he declared in the queue for checkout.

Clara now stares up from her marking expectantly. The Doctor frowns back, hugging the pineapple defensively to his ribs. Humans. They always expect you to have something profound to say when you call out their name.

He responds, “Did you know that Charles Dickens was an amateur magician?”

She is not impressed. “Yes.”

“Really?”

“I teach his books.”

“Even the magician thing?” His lips pucker in disappointment. “Killjoy.”

She tries not to crack a smile. He’s not supposed to be a bother while she’s doing her marking. She’s not supposed to enjoy being bothered.

Of course, that’s when he drops the pineapple six floors onto someone’s head and dives onto the floor like there’s been an explosion and he’s the culprit.

 _“Doctor!”_ Clara scolds.

She crawls onto the balcony with him to get a better look at the damage. They can hear a man shouting obscenities.

Goddammit, that’s her landlord. It’s like a Chiquita Banana advertisement gone horribly wrong.

“I feel dreadful,” the Doctor admits. “That pineapple was really hard to find.”

 

 

**Thursday February 6**

“You need to learn to avoid doing things that you’ll be expected to apologise for later.”

They sit at her kitchen table, surrounded now by a deluge of notecards. He supposes she thought an intervention was necessary after he almost killed someone by edible pinecone.

Clara hands the Doctor a card that says:

I THINK YOU MIGHT BE MISTAKEN [PROCEED TO EXPLAIN THE CORRECT INFORMATION].

This is the alternative to telling people they’re pudding brains, idiots, or no longer allowed to speak to him.

It’s not like he enjoys being right about everything. Having to constantly prove himself to a mob of wrong people is lonely and invites derangement. Also, there’s a certain passive aggressiveness about politeness that doesn’t really suit him.

He may like her handwriting, however, if he had to have an opinion on it.

She writes like the sound of her voice, neat and quick and clearly enunciated, her marking always pristine, even when she’s in a hurry or just nearly eaten by a radioactive polar bear.

What was his point again?

He decides to look on crossly, which tends to be the correct reaction to most things.

 

 

**Friday February 7**

The next day, Clara returns home to find the Doctor sitting at that kitchen table playing canasta with a chap dressed as your friendly neighbourhood Spider Man.

The Doctor grins when he sees her. “So, this is Peter.”

She’s supposed to be proud of him. He made a friend. She doesn’t know for whom to be more afraid.

Apparently, the Doctor was walking around all afternoon reading notecards at strangers on the street, regardless of context or appropriateness. Somehow Peter Parker thought it was a good idea to follow that strange man up to his flat to likely be murdered in a milk bath.

Then again, who is she to judge when she followed the same man into a phone box a year ago? He could be very charismatic.

*

The Doctor later finds Spidey putting Clara’s knickers into a Tesco bag, thus shattering dreams of trusting any random men in fancy dress ever again.

He pulls out a notecard from his jacket, both eyebrows exactly at a 45-degree angle.

He reads with extreme purpose, “I HAVE A FEW CONCERNS.”

 

 

**Sunday February 10**

“Who are you?” The Doctor opens the door a quarter of the way and watches the woman in front of him like she may be a knicker thief—rampant these days.

“I’m Mildred!” the woman answers, as though someone had just informed her of this today.

This means nothing to him.

“Clara’s neighbour?” Mildred suggests, still smiling.

God, he hates cheerful people. Nobody is ever born that cheerful. It’s aberrant.

The Doctor points at the two curly-haired boys at her side, one a toddler and the other no older than six.

“Oh, they belong to me. Fungible and Freckles.”

“Fungible” and “Freckles” is what the Doctor hears. They may have other names.

Clara has offered to mind them for the afternoon, apparently. Something to do with "a trial separation." She was being kind for the sake of it. He doesn’t quite grasp the concept right then.

“Is it not taboo to legally dissociate yourself with your own children?” the Doctor asks. Not that he could blame her for trying. There’s nothing behind their beady little eyes.

The woman laughs, a bit queasy, and then stares back at him in confusion. “I—I’m sorry. Who are you?”

“Hello!” Clara opens the door fully. _Her_ eyes have become monstrously large, doing her demented best to appear the normal neighbour. She’s wearing an apron, which amuses him. So, _that’s_ why she’s been setting chocolate ablaze earlier. He thought she was just in a mood.

“Me?” the Doctor says. “I’m her live-in doctor.”

Clara frowns. “Well, that’s not—”

“Alf Trickelbank at your service.” The Doctor salutes. Clara’s face falls. So much for normal neighbouring. “My old man was considering John, but he went with a family name.”

“There are other Alf Trickelbanks in history?” Clara asks.

“This one’s a delight, isn’t she?” The Doctor points at Clara. “I’ve never met anyone like her. Something of a Napoleon complex.”

Clara forces a laugh and clutches the Doctor’s arm in a threatening manner.

“Then there are the violent tendencies,” he adds.

 _“Oh.”_ Mildred nods.

“All very poor qualities for minding children.”

“Yes.” Mildred seems to consider this for a moment and then looks straight at Clara. “Pick up around six?”

Clara smiles. “Sounds good.”

The Doctor gawks as the woman ushers her children into their home.

Mildred looks over the flat, having noticed that something seems off. Could be the three-tier gold fountain. “Did you renovate?”

“DIY!” Clara offers.

The Doctor deduces for all to hear that this most logically translates to, “Dirigible Isotropic Yoghurt.”

Mildred accepts this and takes Clara aside. “Your mature student is as daft as you’d said,” she whispers. The Doctor is still the weirdest thing in the room. “Generous of you to tutor him in your spare time.”

Clara’s “mature student” has now moved onto peering out the window through an empty paper towel roll, no doubt contemplating an escape.

“Never been the same since he was hit by that flying portable toilet,” Clara explains while putting on the most piss-taking sympathetic air. “Then there were all the hallucinogens for the entirety of the eighties. Sometimes he thinks he’s a Swedish pop star. He used to be an ABBA groupie, you see. Other times he’s a doctor, or a spaceman—” Clara flashes a smug smile, “—or an ass.”

“Oh, dear,” Mildred says, not really caring. Obviously, any children would be guaranteed safe with people who own a three-tiered fountain.

She drops kisses on the boys’ heads and bustles back to the door. “Six o’clock then!”

The door slams shut before Clara can answer.

“The smaller one is looking at me, Clara,” the Doctor says. “Can you make it stop?”

*

He scribbles on his chalkboard and does his best to pretend they’re not there. The children. Like reverse weeping angels. If you make eye contact, you could very well _die_. (And he might as well invent another branch of mathematics in the meantime.)

Freckles, the older one, has the nerve to interrupt his ignoring him. “Are you alright?”

The chalk chips against the board, and the Doctor squints at the boy. “Have you ever remodelled your home only to have it throw a strop and leave the planet?”

“No.”

“Something to look forward to then. Right below neckbeards and acid reflux.”

The Doctor tucks the chalk in his jacket pocket and strides toward the kitchen, decidedly away from the child. Hopefully, he takes the hint.

Freckles cheerfully trots behind him. “Cool.”

*

Clara, the Doctor, and the children all eventually find themselves on a diversionary trip to the nearest dog park. The decision was made after Freckles got himself lost in the Doctor’s experimental hedge maze and Fungible spontaneously went bald.

The fun doesn’t stop there, however. The Doctor immediately gets hit by a wayward tennis ball (thrown by Clara during a game of fetch), which knocks him off balance, causes him to trip over a dachshund, and have a vigorous, impromptu lie-down.

“Is he dead, Miss?”

Clara ignores Freckles and rushes over to the Doctor in the grass, his hands poised to use Venusian aikido, and staring longingly at the dusk-tinted sky. The children and a couple of nosy Pomeranians loom nearby. He has trouble telling which are which.

She kneels and presses her hand to his temple. “Doctor, are you alright?”

“Refulgent,” he answers.

Daleks were never as hard as humans. Maybe that was the point.

_(Davros, you sad old turtle.)_

*

Later, he sits on the edge of her bathtub, his hair lathered in her cherry blossom shampoo while Clara tries to remove dry paint of the hot pink variety with a fine-toothed comb. They take turns having swigs at the last of her tequila.

This was Fungible’s doing hours earlier. He conjured a paint set out of nowhere, stood on a park bench, propped himself against the Doctor, and decided to demonstrate his affection for his new best friend by brandishing a wide and toothless grin and tugging his hair with a paint-soaked fist.

The Doctor looked like his soul had left his body. The whole thing has been documented on Instagram.

“Remind me to send a strongly worded letter to whoever invented children,” the Doctor tells Clara.

“Dit-to,” she replies.

A very stupid thought strikes her. He smells wonderful. And his hair is also very— _no, shut up, shut up. Never finish that thought._

They try to remain stoic for a proper second until foam slops onto his nose, Clara snorts, and they break into drunken, hiccupy laughter.

 

 

**Thursday February 13**

The Doctor offers Clara a paper bag before she goes out the door for work.

“I made you lunch,” he says.

This unsettles her. He’s wearing her apron. “No, you didn’t.”

“Look, I’m being a good flatmate.”

She looks inside the paper bag to find a bottle of multivitamin capsules, a block of cheese, and half a scotch egg.

He put on an apron for _this_.

“Are you drunk?” she asks.

“That reminds me.” He takes a mini bottle of whisky from his trousers pocket and places it in the bag. “Maths and alcoholic beverages, the best way to spend a morning.”

“I teach English.”

“Find a maths teacher. You have one somewhere in that building, don’t you?”

“Did somebody fall in a vat of hot oil?”

“I’m just being kind.”

“No really.”

“Go,” he says. She turns to leave with great suspicion and heaves a sigh when he places both hands square on her shoulders and turns her back to face him.

There’s a powder brush in his hand. He pilfered it from her vanity. Christ, he’s finally lost it. She should have seen it coming. The other day, one of her students told her that a magical pensioner was outside asking for her. “I think he wants you to fight crime,” the boy nervously said.

Before she knows it, the Doctor’s patting the brush on her nose with the utmost level of concentration. She’s both endeared and dead afraid that somebody has body snatched him and left her with a Stepford Wife.

“There,” he says. “Now you’re, you know, kind of presentable.”

“There wasn’t any makeup on it.”

“I thought this was just a tiny duster for your face.”

“Give me that.” She swipes the brush, takes the lunch in her other hand against her better judgment, and slams the door behind her.

“Bye bye.” The Doctor drinks from a second mini bottle of whisky he’d stored in his dressing gown. Humanising at this hour is exhausting.

There are a couple of knocks at the door.

“Ah, back to apologise?” He opens the door to find one very displeased Kate Stewart.

“What is it this time?” She eyes the bottle in his hand. “Whisky and differential equations?”

“You’re not invited.”

Kate hands him a dossier that includes every instance that he’s either broken a law, caused some sort of intergalactic incident, or made somebody’s life particularly difficult. There might be part of him that’s been hoping he can create enough of a ruckus that one of his selves will eventually have to drop by to sort himself out. At which point, he would, well—basically, he’s not above burglarising himself.

Granted, one of the dossier incidents was just his losing control of a Shirley Bassey Fan Club meeting.

There’s also making trouble out of sheer boredom and spite.

Kate crosses her arms, soundlessly communicating that the Doctor have a serious think about his life. “You do realise you’re still on the payroll?”

The Doctor blinks. Wait.

“You could not have told me this before you went on vacation? I was a child minder for a day.”

*

He’s not entirely sure how he ends up in the cemetery in which the Brigadier is buried, shivering in his pyjamas and dressing gown, alcohol on his breath.

He’s let himself become a cliché. Not even the cool kind that usually involves distilled spirits and gloomy gothic surroundings.

They both gaze at her father’s tombstone. It feels like he’s Scrooge, the Brigadier is Marley, and Kate’s about to walk him through all of his past and present misdeeds.

Kate breaks the silence. “My father used to tell me about another time you were stranded on Earth. Said you’d driven him mad.”

“Ah…well.” There’s not exactly a standard response for when the Chief Scientific Officer of UNIT informs you how annoying her dead father found you.

“But he also said he missed you. All those days you spent here…”

Her eyes have gone soft. He wasn’t expecting that. There aren’t any notecards for this.

“Did he?” The Doctor’s left with a lump in his throat. They never got to say goodbye. Not in the way both men would have liked.

He pats the tombstone with fondness, remembering all of it, the good and the absurd. “Next time I’ll bring the brandy.”

“Next time.” Kate smiles.

Ah, well. What ever happened to that roadster anyway?

The Doctor turns to Kate. “So, what kind of scientific advising do you lot need nowadays?”

*

Kate walks him home. Half a block from Clara’s, she asks, “Any plans for Valentine’s day?”

They stop on the pavement, and he gives her a blank look. “Is that an Earth thing?”

“Surely even _you’re_ not that dense. You’ve been married four times.”

More than that, actually, but half the weddings happened because he couldn’t handle awkward silences.

“Is it an English thing?” he continues to ask. “A Lethbridge-Stewart thing?”

“Google it,” she orders, as if there may be munitions involved. “Then find out if Clara has plans tomorrow.”

With that, Kate continues walking. She’s doing that thing again, finding things more amusing than the Doctor thought warranted.

He trails behind her, flabbergasted. “What does Clara have anything to do with it?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you, thank you, thank you to veradune for reading this and giving solid feedback (you can blame the dodgy stuff on me). 
> 
> More to come soon, but I'm not going to jinx myself by setting a time frame. :D :D

**Author's Note:**

> Gifted to jedijanine as part of the Whouffaldi Secret Santa exchange.


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